Automatic stitching of high-resolution images into a single field-of-view mosaic is a capability currently being developed by researchers with disparate applications. Techniques have been developed to enable users to form panoramic views from individual snapshots taken by digital cameras. Typically, these types of techniques are employed in a non-real-time, post-processing environment to generate panoramic images or image sequences for later playback.
However, these techniques are not well suited a real-time, high performance environment. For example, a high performance aircraft or other moveable platform may be provided with multiple cameras for infrared or visible light, generating a plurality of images simultaneously or substantially simultaneously. The cameras can be distributed to provide a very wide angle of coverage. For example, six (6) cameras may provide 4π steradian coverage of a world exterior to the aircraft. Rather than an operator having to watch a separate display for each sensor, greater functionality could be provided by a system that can combine more than one sensor image in real time.
Typically, only a limited portion of the world exterior needs to be presented to an operator, such as a pilot or weapons officer, at any one time via a helmet mounted display (HMD).
In view of the above discussion, it would be beneficial to have a distributed aperture system which enables operators to quickly change line-of-sight views.